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Back We Were Killers Once Save as PDF
Chapters (65)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty–one
  25. Twenty–two
  26. Twenty–three
  27. Twenty–four
  28. Twenty–five
  29. Twenty–six
  30. Twenty–seven
  31. Twenty–eight
  32. Twenty–nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty–one
  35. Thirty–two
  36. Thirty–three
  37. Thirty–four
  38. Thirty–five
  39. Thirty–six
  40. Thirty–seven
  41. Thirty–eight
  42. Thirty–nine
  43. Forty
  44. Forty–one
  45. Forty–two
  46. Forty–three
  47. Forty–four
  48. Forty–five
  49. Forty–six
  50. Forty–seven
  51. Forty–eight
  52. Forty–nine
  53. Fifty
  54. Fifty–one
  55. Fifty–two
  56. Fifty–three
  57. Fifty–four
  58. Fifty–five
  59. Fifty–six
  60. Fifty–seven
  61. Author’s Note
  62. Acknowledgments
  63. Also by Becky Masterman
  64. About the Author
  65. Newsletter Sign-up

And was it sheer coincidence that the two men were in the neighborhood when the Walker family was murdered?

Questions like that have obsessed more than a few over the years.

My internet research brought me to a cold case investigator named Ian Meadows, who operated out of Sarasota County. He had actually gotten permission to exhume the bodies of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, to check their DNA against that in the semen found in the underpants of Christine Walker, the mother who had been raped and shot. The DNA was pretty corrupted in both the bodies and the pants after so many years, but the analysts thought it was good enough for testing. No match was found.

For the umpteenth time I thought, Who killed you?

A welcome distraction. I made a mental note to one of these days call the detective, or even go over to Sarasota to visit him the next time I was in Florida. Find out if he had a next move. These guys loved to talk about cases. Seriously, give them an opening and you can’t shut them up.

Twelve

Beaufort’s drive took him west on I-10, a straight shot out the panhandle of Florida through Alabama, Mississippi (passing back through Pascagoula), Louisiana, and finally Texas. Only not so finally. Texas was the worst, more distance from side to side than all the other states put together, and El Paso was at the farthest point west. He drove five miles over the speed limit the whole way to make the best time possible without making a highway patrolman suspicious.

He wasn’t expected in El Paso until three nights later, so he took his time, doing about five hundred miles a day, stopping at motels now that he had the extra money. It was easy to find computers at each stop, twice at small libraries, and once in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express. From one of those locations he sent an email under the account he had created. The librarian in the Pascagoula library was right about being able to use his email account from any computer. From one of the places he stopped he sent an email to the current chaplain at Lansing. He said he was doing some genealogy research (from TV commercials everybody seemed to be doing it) and was looking into a relative who had been a chaplain there. Did they have a record of every minister who had served there, and could he get it? Hopefully with the years they were there?

He hoped a chaplain would be a little more cooperative than a government bureaucrat. It didn’t appear that way, though. The next time he was able to get to a computer, the next night, there was no response waiting.